It is the trifling things that tell, and give character to
nations; extraordinary things may occur anywhere, and possess little
national flavor. In another chapter I will attempt some portrayal of
this English life of fifty years since.

VI

Patricians and plebeians--The discomforts of democracy--
Varieties of equality--Social rights of beggars--The coming
peril--Being dragged to the rich--Frankness of vulgarity and
hopelessness of destitution--Villages rooted in the
landscape--Evanescence of the spiritual and survival of the
material--"Of Bebbington the holy peak"--The Old Yew of
Eastham--Malice--prepense interest--History and afternoon
tea--An East-Indian Englishman--The merchantman sticks in
the mud--A poetical man of the world--Likeness to
Longfellow--Real breakfasts--Heads and stomachs--A poet-
pugilist--Clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry--A respectable female
atheist--The tragedy of the red ants--Voluptuous struggles--
A psalm of praise.

In a country whose ruling principle is caste, it might be expected that
the line of cleavage between the upper and the lower grades would be
punctually observed. It is assumed that democracy levels and aristocracy
distinguishes and separates. My father was not long in remarking,
however, that there was a freedom of intercourse between the patrician
and the plebeian--between people of all orders--such as did not exist in
America. And the fact, once perceived, was not difficult of explanation.
In a monarchy of a thousand years' standing, every individual knows his
place in the social scale and never thinks of leaving it. He represents
a fixed function or element in the general organism, and holds to it as
a matter of course, just as, in the human body, the body does not aspire
to be the head, nor the liver or heart to take the place of lungs
or stomach. The laborer looks back upon an ancestry of laborers; the
shopkeeper has been a shopkeeper for unnumbered generations; the artisan
on the bench to-day does the same work that his father and grandfathers
did before him; the noble inherits his acres as inevitably as the sun
rises, and sits in the House of Lords by immemorial usage and privilege.
Social position all along the line being thus anchored in the nature
of things, as it were, there is no anxiety on any one's part as to
maintaining his status. He is secure where he is, and nothing and nobody
can change him